I should preface this article by stating that I am not a theorist when it comes to computer science. I like theory, and I think it’s interesting, but I make a living by building cool applications, not by building cool theories. That said, I occaisonally read the Communications of the ACM, especially when clients have it in their offices while I am waiting for a meeting. This happened to be the case the other day, when I picked up the (quite out of date) April 2007 issue of Communications, and came upon a very interesting article by Jenova Chen, founder of That Game Company, entitled Flow in Games (and Everything Else). It is based on her thesis at USC, and focuses on applying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory to software design. Basically, good interfaces that captivate the user transport them to the Flow, which “represents the feeling of complete an energized focus in an activity, with a high level of enjoyment and fulfillment. To achieve a flow state, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. If the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Chen applies this idea to games, identifying eight major components of Flow: a challenging activity requiring skill; a merging of action and awareness; clear goals; direct, immediate feedback; concentration on the task at hand; a sense of control; a loss of self-consciousness; and an altered sense of time.

When I read this list, however, I don’t think of games. I think of some of the great web applications I have interacted with. Basecamp, for example, fulfills many of the components of Flow. I have certainly lost myself in that program for hours as I direct Intelli-Computing, so I have personally experienced it. When we design web application interfaces, there is no reason why we can’t incorporate the euphoria of the Flow that makes the games of Chen’s theory so successful.